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The last post in this series discussed categorizing your email in order to save time. This tip will help you understand how following the Golden Rule when it comes to email can help you save time too.

Tip 3: Use the Golden Rule - Don't waste other people's time

Fret often about the number of incoming emails that force you to waste your time reading, responding and organizing your mailbox, every day? You have only yourself to blame.

Remember the Golden Rule about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you? Well there's a similar rule for email too and this is how it goes: "If an email takes longer than five minutes to read and respond to, then it shouldn't have been an email in the first place."

Wake up and recognize that you live in the age of technology. You can exchange more information over a 5-minute phone call than you ever can via email conversations that take you ten minutes to write, take your recipient ten minutes to read and then go back and forth several times anyway.

If you are under the impression that dashing off an email to someone is an effective and productive way of cleaning out your plate, remember that what goes around, ultimately comes around. Hence the burgeoning number of email replies in your mailbox.

A simple solution would be to pick up the phone and get the job done, rather than send out email essays that will most certainly turn around and bite your mailbox in the rear.